The Intersection

Day and night Ernest watched the intersection with vigilance. He was retired, had no hobbies, and couldn’t sleep at night what with all the medication he’d been prescribed.

Most of the cars and drivers he had come to recognize, and he even knew how often and when they passed. Some were harder to pick out than others. The partly bald guys in their zippy little BMWs, the hockey-then-soccer moms in their gargantuan SUVs, the shiny new pickups driven just as often by young women as men, and the low-slung, loud mufflered rides of the working class twenty-somethings were the easiest to identify.

They happened—the traffic violations—year-round, but only in summer was it especially dangerous for pedestrians since that’s when people enjoyed getting out and walking. Because there were no sidewalks, they had to walk on the road. The intersection was a T, and only one direction had a stop sign, although it wasn’t apparent that anyone exercised any less right of way than anybody else.

Two hundred and eighty-seven in one hour was the record for the number of traffic violations Ernest had witnessed. He told a police officer who said he’d look into it, but nothing ever happened. He tried again with the police, this time separating the pedestrian population into senior, young adult, middle age, and school children. Same result. He went to the city. He was told it was a police matter. The police, he was assured, would look into it.

Meanwhile an accident occurred down the street. Just a block away, an eight-year-old girl on her brand-new bicycle was struck by a Lexus SUV. Fortunately, the SUV was nearly stopped, and it bumped rather than hit the child. The bike didn’t even get a scratch, and the little girl only suffered a small scrape on her elbow where she fell down on the pavement. She needed a band aid to calm her, but it didn’t stay on very long as she recounted what had happened, arms waving in the air, to anyone who would listen.

The next day, Ernest erected a large and highly-visible sign at his intersection, righteously proclaiming it a “Zero Accident Zone.” At the bottom of the sign, there was a picture of a camera. He credited himself with being a genius and a saviour, too. However, by the end of the day, his town councillor came by and informed him that the sign had to go.

He continued to monitor the traffic. Drawing on his former expertise, he plotted data in three dimensions, constructed elaborate graphs and colourful charts, and developed complicated forecasting models to demonstrate the real and projected dangers at the intersection.

He wrote a letter to the newspaper editor, but, due to a backlog, so he was told, it wasn’t printed until after Christmas by which time most of the pedestrians were safely indoors for the season.

The following year Ernest moved into a condo. There was no view of the street. That had been a condition.

 He started weaning himself off his meds on a trial basis but resumed his full dosage upon discovering that there was a children’s daycare in the apartment above him.

First published in Down in the Dirt, November/December 2015, vol. 133.